Laura Mulvey's theory
Laura Mulvey is a theorist that argues audiences look at films voyeuristically, were the charaters cant see them and usually the audience cant either. Watching the characters on screen makes them voyeurs, which can lead to objectification. The male gaze is very well known, mentioned in Mulveys book 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'(1975), showing how and why men get pleasure from looking at women.
Mulvey also mentions that male protagonist's are not conventionally attractive, although women(actresses) have to be attractive and usually young, and still remain in supporting roles. These women are apart of the male gaze ('eye candy').
Definitions
Voyeurism: Voyeurism is a practice in which an individual derives sexual pleasure from observing other people. Such people may be engaged in sexual acts, or be nude or in underwear, or dressed in whatever other way the "voyeur" finds appealing.
Fetishism: Fetishism in psychoanalysis refers to an over-investment in a strangely ( unnaturally ) attractive object, person or practice. For Freud, this desire is driven by a significant but unconscious absence or lack, which is then displaced onto something else. As always with Freud, the lack of the phallus is significant for women, the castration complex for men. See also the marxist notion of commodity fetishism.
Objectification: Objectification refers to the way in which one person treats another person as an object and not as a human being. This is commonly used to refer to the way the mass media, in particular advertising, is perceived by some as portraying women as sex objects (although this treatment now increasingly also extends to men). Narcissistic scopophilia: is looking at other people as seeing them as surrogates for yourself. We also identify with people in movies. So there is a tension here between the sense of power we get from observing others as separate from ourselves and the pleasure we get in imagining that we are the people we are looking at.
Laura Mulvey is a theorist that argues audiences look at films voyeuristically, were the charaters cant see them and usually the audience cant either. Watching the characters on screen makes them voyeurs, which can lead to objectification. The male gaze is very well known, mentioned in Mulveys book 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'(1975), showing how and why men get pleasure from looking at women.
Mulvey also mentions that male protagonist's are not conventionally attractive, although women(actresses) have to be attractive and usually young, and still remain in supporting roles. These women are apart of the male gaze ('eye candy').
Definitions
Voyeurism: Voyeurism is a practice in which an individual derives sexual pleasure from observing other people. Such people may be engaged in sexual acts, or be nude or in underwear, or dressed in whatever other way the "voyeur" finds appealing.
Fetishism: Fetishism in psychoanalysis refers to an over-investment in a strangely ( unnaturally ) attractive object, person or practice. For Freud, this desire is driven by a significant but unconscious absence or lack, which is then displaced onto something else. As always with Freud, the lack of the phallus is significant for women, the castration complex for men. See also the marxist notion of commodity fetishism.
Objectification: Objectification refers to the way in which one person treats another person as an object and not as a human being. This is commonly used to refer to the way the mass media, in particular advertising, is perceived by some as portraying women as sex objects (although this treatment now increasingly also extends to men). Narcissistic scopophilia: is looking at other people as seeing them as surrogates for yourself. We also identify with people in movies. So there is a tension here between the sense of power we get from observing others as separate from ourselves and the pleasure we get in imagining that we are the people we are looking at.
posted by kelly at 11:35 AM
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